Attention Control and Emotional Regulation Among Long-Term Adolescent Taekwondo Practitioners With and Without ADHD: An Exploratory Mixed-Methods Study

Most existing research on martial arts and ADHD measures cognitive test scores in children, leaving out important details of how adolescents themselves experience the training. Previous studies rarely examine emotional regulation as its own outcome. Therefore, the current exploratory mixed-methods study explored self-reported attention control, emotional regulation, and self-control in long-term adolescent Taekwondo practitioners with and without self-reported ADHD diagnoses, and which facets of training participants believed were relevant to these capacities. Ten adolescent Taekwondo practitioners aged 14 to 18 (five ADHD, five non-ADHD) participated in the survey, while three additional practitioners took part in semi-structured interviews. Overall, the participants reported high self-regulation across all three domains. Participants with ADHD reported significantly higher attention control than participants without ADHD. However, in this small sample, the attention composite exhibited low internal consistency, and this should not be interpreted as evidence that participants with ADHD had objectively better attention or that Taekwondo improved attention. Emotional regulation did not significantly differ between groups, and the study was insufficient to detect a group difference in the domain. The number of years of training showed little or no correlation with the outcomes, suggesting no evidence of a dose-response relationship. Interviews pointed to features of training that participants perceived as helpful, including Poomsae and high-stakes sparring. Because the design was cross-sectional, involved a small sample of long-term practitioners, used study-specific self-report measures, and did not include any baseline or non-Taekwondo comparison group, the results should be considered descriptive and hypothesis-generating, rather than evidence of therapeutic efficacy.